This blog started as a place to bring objectivity, quantitative analysis, and science to green living, but has evolved to focus more on my research, with some cool science stories mixed in. I reserve the right to write about anything that fascinates me. I'm a senior conservation scientist for The Nature Conservancy, but content posted here is my own. I tweet at @sciencejon and my bio is at https://www.nature.org/science-in-action/our-scientists/jon-fisher.xml

Thursday, February 28, 2013

I had always taken evolution more or less for granted. The
evidence in support of it is pretty overwhelming, and the remaining gaps in the
theory are pretty small. But when I took a biophysics class about 15 years ago
and learned about the incredible complexity of the nervous system, I was taken
aback. It’s easy to think about the evolution of something like a wing, where
intermediate steps might lead to the ability to make longer jumps or glide
before flight is eventually possible. But our neurons require several ion
channels to send electrical impulses, and some of the steps towards even a
primitive nervous system offer no apparent benefit, making it difficult to
understand how they could have evolved. Eventually I had to accept that this
was a mystery that we couldn’t answer yet.

It can be tempting to avoid thinking about gaps in dominant
scientific theories (whether unexplained steps in evolution, the inability of
the standard model in particle physics to explain gravity, remaining areas of
uncertainty in climate change modeling, etc.). But I love keeping an eye open
for new research into topics that I remain unsatisfied by. I’m encouraged that
while we’re still not entirely clear why
these early components of neurons spread, we at least have evidence showing how the neuron evolved.

The basic idea is that even though bugs like house centipedes and nematodes can be super gross, once you know what they do (e.g. eat roaches and bedbugs, and eat fly larvae respectively) they start to look a whole lot better!